The New World Avenue and Vicinity

by Tadeusz Konwicki

Konwicki careens purposefully from private history (his vices, obsessive Lithuanian reveries, and advancing old age) to a time capsule of cultural to portraits of the artists, writers, actors, and film directors who accounted for the explosive burst of creative activity in Poland after the war. His tone can be mischievous, cantankerous, or despairing, but also unexpectedly touching.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Prose writer, screenwriter and film director. Founder of the 'cinema d'auteur' in Poland and author of 20 books. Born in 1926 in Nowa Wilejka, near Vilnius (today Naujoji Vilnia, Lithuania), died on January 7th in Warsaw at 88 years old.

Konwicki was educated at the Universities of Cracow and Warsaw and began writing for newspapers and periodicals. He served on the editorial boards of leading literary magazines and followed the official Communist Party line. His first work, Przy budowie (1950; “At the Construction Site”), won the State Prize for Literature. He began a career as a filmmaker and scriptwriter in 1956; his film Ostatni dzień lata (“The Last Day of Summer”) won the Venice Film Festival Grand Prix in 1958. By the late 1960s he had quit the Communist Party, lost his job in the official film industry, and become active in the opposition movement.

Konwicki’s work is suffused with guilt and anxiety, coloured by his wartime experiences and a sense of helplessness in confronting a corrupt and repressive society. Chief among his novels are Rojsty (1956; “The Marshes”) and Sennik wspóczesny (1963; A Dreambook for Our Time), a book that writer and critic Czesław Miłosz called “one of the most terrifying novels of postwar Polish literature.” His other works of that period are Wniebowsta̦pienie (1967; “Ascension”) and Zwierzoczłekoupiór (1969; The Anthropos-Spectre-Beast). His later books—including Kompleks polski (1977; The Polish Complex), the bitterly mocking Mała apokalipsa (1979; A Minor Apocalypse), and the lyrical Bohiń (1987; Bohin Manor)—confront Poland’s social cataclysms of the late 1970s and the ’80s. The autobiographical Wschody i zachody ksie̦życa (1981; Moonrise, Moonset) recounts some of Konwicki’s experiences during the period of martial law in Poland.

Reviews

[Davy Bennett · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been reading this book, am currently on page 68.
I gave it 5 stars because I am 1/4 Lithuanian.
I am now on page 168 and it has been sort of a slog. I adjusted it to 3 stars.

I finished this book today. 3.49 stars.
Overall it was worth it, to get a little insight into the Polish-Lithuanian dynamic, and mostly post WW2 Poland. I have not yet visited that area so I like to get a little fill-in information from books like this one from a Polish writer and poet. I did that with Levins Mill about late 19th Century East Prussia, by a post WW2 Communist East German poet/writer. In mixed up East Prussia at that time, a lot of ethnic Germans had Polish surnames, and Poles might have German last names. After WW2 that area was ethnically cleansed of Germans and became the Soviet Russian colony of Kaliningrad. The Germans themselves had more or less ethnically cleansed the native Prussians in the middle ages. Those original Prussians had been close cousins to the Lithuanians and Latvians. Some survivors may have been driven off and merged in with their neighboring cousins?

I got the impression in this book that the author was a somewhat lapsed Catholic, though mostly lapsed from the organized part of it, and a mostly winning struggle with modernism (he seems to believe in God). Later in the book when he went off on a fictionalized contemporary 1980s plane trip to Australia, he came off as Jewish. He made up for it a year or two later with an actual trip there. This Australia trip was a literary device to get him as a guest in the cabin with a pilot he knew slightly from youth in the Wilno Colony (East Vilnius). When the book came out he may have gotten a subsidized trip.

I like the vignettes about the authors youth spent in Wilno (Vilnius).
The author is Polish and was popular there.
New World Avenue in Warsaw is mostly where he lived, which by necessity had to be rebuilt after WW2. The author lived for a couple of years in Cracow, and it was mostly untouched, since Shicklgruber wanted it that way due to the teutonic part of its past.

My favorite excerpt from the book was from Konwicki's colleague/pal Stanislaw Cat-Mackiewicz and involved a great take on Pilsudki's youth [1867-1890] and his observations of a seemingly voluntary downhill slide of the Polish Lithuanian gentry at this time, and speculations on why it was. Part of it was a response to the failed uprising of 1863 against czarist Russia, and not seeing much future. Poland and Lithuania were absorbed by Russia in 1791, it was getting very old by 1863.

It is sort of a depressing read, since it is from the mid 1980s when they were still under the Bolshevik boot, which was worse than the czarist boot which dominated starting around 1791. Mind you, neither was good.

I have trouble with the Polish names and ways, about the only latter day Polish artist i know is Roman Polanski. If you go back there is Chopin and Adam Mickiewicz and Henry Stenkewicz or similar.

There was a Polish Lithuanian War in 1920-1921 over Vilnius, this was during the Russian Civil War. The author didn't mention that directly.
I found out recently from a cousin that on my maternal grandmothers mothers side there may have been some gentry with Polish ties of some kind. I think my maternal grandmothers Dad was a standard peasant, from Samogitian/Zemaitiyan stock, which is out near the Baltic in western Lithuania, fairly near the port of Klaipeda/Memel, but east of there in the sticks.

The Poles dominated the landlord class in Lithuania and Ukraine. Byelorussian prescence has been heavy in this area too at times.
Lets not forget the formerly heavy Jewish prescence in Vilnius, the Jerusalem of the North, before most Jews were massacred in WW2.

I am pretty well read on the area for an American, but have never been there. I have been to Chicago though. Been to the Balzekas Museum and Grand Dukes Restaurant, have tried all the beers.
Stumbled on the Polish State Convention at an 1870's Church in New Waverly Texas...2022.
In Texas the Czechs and Germans get the props but there is quite a bit of Polish history too, you just have to dig more for it.

I welcome corrections or additions to this narrative. Most reading this and still awake probably know more than me.

Googling Konwicki wasn't real fruitful for a non-Pole speaker.

I loved the grim book Bloodlands by Dr. Timothy Snyder.
War and Peace too, though when I first read it in the 1980s I didn’t even know Nap was traipsing around Lithuania, so I re-read it with new eyes. Kinda zoned out near the end both times and didnt totally get what Tolstoy was preaching about regarding the broad currents.

[Aharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book you've been waiting for, if you've been waiting for an oblique critique of the Polish government in the 1980s. And damned if I wasn't!